For Both Health and Environment: What is Plogging?

Walking, running or cycling outdoors are not only beneficial for your body but also nourish your soul. Adding another value to these activities that will help protect the environment can help our world. This is where plogging comes into play. Let’s take a brief look at the concept of plogging.

What is plogging?

Statistics on plastic pollution are starting to increase. We produce 300 million tonnes of plastic every year, of which approximately 8.8 million tonnes is dumped into the oceans, threatening countless animals. This causes many of them to be on the verge of extinction. If this continues, it is estimated that there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans by 2050.

Various applications are being made on many wastes that threaten our world, such as plastic. We can say that one of these is plogging, which started in Sweden in 2016 and spread all over the world. Plogging, which comes from the Swedish words plocka upp (to lift) and jogga (running), involves walking and running by collecting garbage and waste from the environment.

Plogging makes your daily exercises beneficial for the environment and nature. Waste such as plastic, paper and garbage collected during running and walking help reduce the damage to nature. Plastic may be an easy-to-detect material, but small litter and waste such as bills, bottle caps and cigarette butts negatively affect biodiversity. With plogging, these small pieces can be detected and collected more easily.

How to do plogging?

For plogging, you need very easily accessible and simple materials. A large garbage bag and gloves are sufficient. More and more important steps are being taken every day to make the world cleaner, either individually or by participating in group activities created for plogging.

Since you will bend and stand up more while plogging, the effort you will put in also increases. Thus, running or walking becomes more effective. Plogging provides both an effective exercise and the aim of purifying nature from waste and garbage; It emerges as one of the most positive activities of recent times.

To make group plogging more fun, it may be possible to turn it into an enjoyable competition, such as who can collect the most garbage in the shortest time. We also need to remember that the collected waste and garbage should be taken to recycling points. Whatever the outcome, it will be quite satisfying to know that the real winner will be “nature”. We should not neglect to share this activity with the people around us, because such concepts and ideas multiply and gain meaning as they are shared.

One of the most interesting aspects of plogging is that it has quickly become a global trend since its emergence. Special groups for plogging have been created in many major cities of the world. The most common garbage collected by ploggers includes disposable plastic bottles, plastic caps, food packaging and straws.